Facebook has approached academics and policy experts about forming a committee to advise it on global election-related matters, five people with knowledge of the discussions said, a move that would allow the social network to shift some of its political decision-making to a advisory body.
The proposed committee could decide on issues such as the viability of political advertisements and what to do about election-related misinformation, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the discussions were confidential. Facebook is expected to announce the committee this fall in preparation for the 2022 midterm elections, they said, though the effort is tentative and could still fall apart.
Outsourcing election matters to a panel of experts could help Facebook evade criticism of political group bias, two of the people said. The company has been criticized in recent years by conservatives, who accused Facebook of suppressing their vote, as well as by civil rights groups and Democrats for allowing political misinformation to fester and spread online. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t want to be seen as the sole decision maker about political content, two people said.
Facebook declined to comment.
If an election commission is formed, it would mimic the move Facebook took in 2018 when it created the so-called Oversight Board, a collection of journalistic, legal and policy experts who assess whether the company was right to remove certain posts from its platforms. Facebook has pushed a number of substantive decisions to the Oversight Board for review, allowing it to demonstrate that it doesn’t make decisions alone.
Facebook, which has positioned the Oversight Board as independent, appointed and paid the people on the panel through a trust.
The Oversight Board’s most notable decision was its review of Facebook’s suspension of former President Donald J. Trump after the storming of the US Capitol on January 6. At the time, Facebook chose to indefinitely ban Mr Trump’s account, a punishment the Board of Trustees later deemed “inappropriate” because the time frame was not based on the company’s rules. The board asked Facebook to try again.
In June, Facebook responded by saying it would ban Mr Trump from the platform for at least two years. The Oversight Board has separately weighed in on more than a dozen other content issues it calls “highly emblematic” of broader themes that Facebook regularly grapples with, including whether certain Covid-related posts should stay on the network and hate speech issues in Myanmar.
A spokesperson for the Supervisory Board declined to comment.
Facebook has a spotty track record on election-related issues, dating back to Russia’s manipulation of the platform’s ads and posts during the 2016 presidential election.
Lawmakers and buyers of political ads also criticized Facebook for changing its rules on political ads ahead of the 2020 presidential election. Last year, the company said it would ban the purchase of new political ads the week before the election, and later decided to ban all political ads. Temporarily ban US political ads after polls closed on election day, sparking an outcry among candidates and advertising agencies.
The company struggles to deal with lies and hate speech surrounding elections. During his last year in office, Mr. Trump used Facebook to suggest he would use state violence against protesters in Minneapolis ahead of the 2020 election, while sowing doubts about the electoral process when the votes were counted in November. Facebook initially said that what political leaders posted was newsworthy and should not be touched, before it later changed course.
The social network has also encountered issues in elections elsewhere, including the spread of targeted misinformation through its WhatsApp messaging service during the 2018 Brazilian presidential election. In 2019, Facebook removed hundreds of deceptive pages and accounts associated with political parties in India ahead of the country’s national elections.
Facebook has tried several methods to deal with the criticism. It has set up a library of political ads to increase transparency around buyers of those promotions. It has also set up war rooms to monitor the elections for disinformation to prevent interference.
In the coming year, there will be several elections in countries such as Hungary, Germany, Brazil and the Philippines where Facebook’s performance will be scrutinized. Disinformation about voter fraud has already started to spread in the run-up to the German elections in September. In the Philippines, Facebook has removed networks of fake accounts that support President Rodrigo Duterte, who used the social network in 2016 to gain power.
“There is already a perception that Facebook, an American social media company, is going in through its platform and tilting other countries’ elections,” said Nathaniel Persily, a law professor at Stanford University. “All the decisions Facebook makes have global implications.”
Internal discussions about an election commission date from at least a few months ago, according to three people with expertise.
An election commission would differ from the board of trustees in one important way, the people said. While the Oversight Board waits for Facebook to delete a post or account and then reviews that action, the Election Commission would proactively provide advice without the company calling before, they said.
Tatenda Musapatike, who previously worked on elections at Facebook and now runs a voter registration nonprofit, said many have lost faith in the company’s ability to work with political campaigns. But the election commission’s proposal was “a good step,” she said, because “they’re doing something and they’re not saying we can handle it alone.”
